Away Post

As much as I'd love to yap at you some more about everything I've been working on for the rest of Redemption Harem v0.2, most of what I've been working on are implementing the things I've already told you about and new maps, and it's kinda hard to say more about new maps than "they exist now."

 

I do have some news, though it isn't related to game development - I'll be out of town to help family for most of the next week. I'm trying to get something close enough to done that I can give a little bit of a preview for the Patreon and Subscribestar post this Friday, but training still isn't as fully implemented as it should be and I still have to pack today so I can leave tomorrow morning.

I'll still put something up if for no other reason than I know not everyone that goes to Patreon and Subscribestar also read this dev blog, but there's a good chance it ends up just being a text post instead of a teaser image like I want it to be.

 

Since being out of town means I can't get any more work done, next week's blog post is highly likely to just be "I'm back," but I hope I'll see you here next week anyway. 

Redemption Harem - Reworking Hunting for v0.2

Getting hunting fully implemented was surprisingly difficult. I had all the mechanics functioning on an individual test animal in time for the Patreon and Subscribestar post last Friday, but when I tried to get things copied into the existing animals, some were fleeing the moment I stepped into the map, some would stand completely still if another animal was triggered to flee, and all animals would respawn immediately on re-entering the map rather than disappearing until the next day. A few wouldn't even correctly despawn after fleeing.

 

It took all weekend, but all of that is fixed now. The reason some were fleeing immediately was due to a scripting issue that kept their self-switches activated, so all animals were reworked to have a fail-safe layer that turns those switches off. That didn't work at first because there was a coding issue that was operating the self-switch of other events, and that code has been updated to refer to "this map, this event" rather than specifying the map and event in question. With that (and some investigating that led to the fail-safe being implemented), multiple animals finally behaved the way they were supposed to, so all that was needed was to rework their drop tables to take your hunter level into account, then copy/paste the new reworked animals to replace the old ones.

I still need to do some testing to make sure I'm not missing something else that I haven't encountered, but reworking the code does mean I'm now able to do things like cause groups of animals to flee if you scare one of them. That's not a mechanic I intend to use often, but it's nice to have it as an option.

 

Hunting and farming were the two big new mechanics for v0.2 that were missing from v0.1, so from here on out, it's mostly new content. I say "mostly" because there are some additions to old content I need to make still.

For starters, Nadua doesn't really have her degrade or euphoria events. I think they can be triggered (I haven't tested it yet), but nothing happens, so those scenes need to be rendered and written. Related to that, since consent is important, I want to put in a choice for the player to either go along with the "attack" or literally fight them off, similar to how you get that option now if a captured character degrades to the point where they're "too far gone" and you have to fight them, but it's now your choice if you actually want to kill them. 

Off the back of that, I want to rework training a bit so you have the option of Sparring in addition to "Training." As is, you can spar with Nadua and you can "Train" with Asgina, but you can't "Train" with Nadua (you can replay the scene and restore her Condition if you haven't done your daily training yet, but she doesn't get stats from it) and you can't spar with Asgina. Sparring with Nadua is also just a fade to black and a random number roll. While I want to keep that as a "basic drills" type of option so you can skip having to actually fight, I'm also thinking through how to eventually let you teach your party members each other's skills, and sparring manually will likely play a role in that.

The basics of that idea right now are still pretty early in the idea phase, so I don't want to get too in-depth here just yet. For now, all you need to know about training updates is that you'll still have a "skip - fade to black" option, a manual option where different outcomes (such as knocking out your sparring partner vs "capturing" them vs losing the fight) will have different effects that you should have at least some control over, and the "training" option to replay a scene that will have a different effect from sparring if you haven't trained yet that day and no effect if you've already trained and are just replaying the scene for your own enjoyment.

Redemption Harem - Starting Development on v0.2

Development on v0.2 has actually been underway since the moment v0.1 was deployed, but who's counting?

 

Most of that time has been spent rebalancing things a bit - the Tie Down skill now upgrades the existing Bound state and only does damage if the target isn't Bound at all instead of being a damaging skill with a higher chance of Binding the target, for starters. That means you won't accidentally kill some of the weaker enemies after needing to use another damaging skill to get them Bound in the first place, and you won't need to spam that skill after spending eight turns Guarding in order to actually capture things.

Tie Down is also cheaper now that its use case is narrower, and you now get roughly double the TP from successfully parrying enemy attacks (even if you miss the parry and only guard). All together, these changes should make capturing enemies considerably less tedious without making an impromptu shibari session the most effective way to fight tougher enemies. 

 

Also, as a follow-up to the farming post from last Friday on Patreon and Subscribestar, I was able to get the farming system completely set up over the weekend and have been testing it to make sure I didn't miss a variable somewhere. I can't test every possible combination, as there are 16 plots and 8 available crops, and if my math is right, there are almost 13,000 of them. 

This is why I so deeply appreciate those of you who report any bugs you find.

I haven't found any bugs in it yet, though. If you read the post on Patreon/Substar, I was able to get everything set up as described there; you can plant whatever, and while it'll take longer to grow by default to offset the larger yield, you can water crops to speed up growth. 

The only potential issue is that I've been kicking around the idea of a weather system in my head to go along with the day/night system, and with how the garden is set up, I can't think of a way to make the crops count as automatically watered if it's raining. It won't be that hard to do the mechanical effect of watering the crops if it happens to be raining, but stopping you from watering them anyway to get double the effect is a bit trickier. That's a problem for the future, though; I'm still not totally sure I want to bother with a weather system anyway, since other than rain auto-watering your crops, there may not be any mechanical effect to it. And if I put the work into making a weather system, I'll want there to be some kind of mechanical effect, even if it's just characters being indoors when they're normally outside.

 

The actual next mechanic I'm working on is the Hunting system, which will be the first profession you have to find out in the world. Doing that won't be anything intense, you just won't start the game with it.

If you want to know more about that, go click one of the Patreon and/or Substar links and keep an eye out there. Depending on how much trouble it gives me, I might need to talk about something else while I work the kinks out of it, but I'm hoping to get far enough along to be able to tell you how those mechanics will work this Friday.